by Alex Horne
2 Just by the way, as well as tremendous birdwatching, the Isles of Scilly also boast the smallest football league in the world featuring just two teams. Woolpack Wanderers and Garrison Gunners play each other sixteen times a season and compete for two cups as well as the league title. I wonder who I’d have supported if I’d been brought up there.
3 Yes, that is an odd sentence. Jizz is a birdwatching term which apparently derives from US slang for ‘General Impression of Shape and Size’.
4 When I say ‘literally’ here I mean with my eyes. But I also couldn’t have ‘taken them all in’ to my house or ‘taken them all in’ for questioning. However literally you take the phrase, it remains true.
5 It’s most likely that the parakeets are simply descendants of domestic pets which managed to escape from their cages and survive in the urban wild of London. But one other story that might just check out is that they were actually extras from the film The African Queen, starring Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn. A flock of about twenty birds did, apparently, vanish from the set’s aviary in Shepperton Studios in 1951. The film also featured blood-sucking leeches, mosquitoes and crocodiles, so if the tale is true I suppose London was rather lucky.
6 Not, as I first thought he’d said, scooters, ‘scoters’ are in fact stocky black sea ducks. Without a telescope, they look like debris.
7 I wasn’t sure if that made sense. Or, if it did make sense, whether it would be useful to already be in next year. It sounded good though.
CHAPTER 11
Lucky Dip
‘It may sound arrogant, but I usually find it inexcusable to miss a bird as I always plan thoroughly, concentrate fully and apply myself completely to the job in hand. How then can I possibly fail? Well, like everyone else, I sometimes do.’
– Adrian M Riley
Alex:
254 species
Duncton:
211 species
7 November
DAVID APPRECIATED THE urgency of my situation. When I told him the dastardly Duncton had arranged a last minute dash to Africa he cleared his diary for the following Saturday and started planning our own intensive tour. In the meantime, he stressed that I should be checking my birding websites every other minute for anything that might aid my cause. I was already on the case, but most of the reports coming in were of birds I’d already seen – little stints, a hen harrier, even a puffin at Reculver in Kent – and that I couldn’t afford to chase up. But then, one morning at 10.38 a.m. my Batlaptop started flashing:
London Birders’ forum: There has been no mention on this forum yet of a report of a Pallas’s warbler yesterday (Monday 6 Nov) in Chiswick. For those who haven’t heard but might want to look for the bird, Rare Bird Alert last night reported that it was ‘in Hadley Gardens in east side of road in garden near bend briefly at 2.45 p.m.’ It’s a major London bird, so certainly worth checking out if anyone has the time …
I always had time for a major London bird, so dropped everything1 and sped down to Hadley Gardens. I didn’t even waste valuable seconds looking up what this major bird looked like, presuming it was pretty similar to all the other tiny warbling types I’d struggled with all year.
I didn’t have a compass and am not a natural orienteer, so when I arrived in Chiswick I couldn’t be sure which was the east side of the road and had to peer into every garden along either side of the bend in the road. This was a delicate operation. I didn’t want people to notice me peering, but if they did notice me peering, I didn’t want them to think I was peering suspiciously, like a thief. I wanted people to think, that’s fine, he’s looking for a Pallas’s warbler, not checking out our house for burglary potential. I pretended to be having a difficult phone conversation that involved me wheeling around as if in despair, then staring into someone’s garden as if in deep concentration. This was fine for one brief recce, but could I do it again without arousing suspicion?
I didn’t think so. I pretended to hang up the phone (an easy piece of acting but I think I carried it off well) and walked back to my car, allowing myself just one glance per garden on the way. Needless to say, I didn’t see the bird. I did spot a couple of blackbirds and a robin but nothing I didn’t recognise (that was my cunning plan for recognising the warbler – by not being able to recognise it). Only one person looked at me suspiciously from their window.
Back at home I got straight on to my Batlaptop and inputted my own bird data for the very first time:
No sign of the Pallas’s Warbler between 12 noon and 1 p.m. today. Couldn’t stay any longer unfortunately – and no sign of other birders either … Alex
Mission sort of accomplished. I hadn’t seen the bird but I had contributed to the London birding scene. As Duncton had told me about his butterfly eggs: ‘It’s sometimes just as useful to not find something.’
I had definitely not seen the Pallas’s warbler. I had helped.
11 November
Inspired once more by David, I cleared my whole Saturday for our big bird trip, our last scheduled outing together of the year. Barely even registering the early hour, I picked him up at 6 a.m. so that we might arrive at our first destination before dawn. I didn’t have a gig that evening, so every possible minute would be spent looking for birds. This was a massive deal for me. But for David – and thousands of other dedicated birders – this was just a normal day out.
Like a scout master or a commando (let’s go with commando) David had meticulously mapped a route that would maximise my bird-gap-plugging potential.
‘You haven’t got fieldfare yet?’ he’d asked me.
‘No,’ I’d replied, ‘I haven’t got fieldfare yet.’
‘And you never saw a willow warbler?’
‘I know,’ I said, ‘we’ve got work to do.’
We watched the sun rise at Cliffe, the same spot in Kent where we’d seen blackcaps and whitethroats back in May. This time we were here specifically to see the little auk that was apparently lingering. I was excited about this bird. One of my good but annoyingly musical friends’ surname is Auckland. Our family call their family the Auks. I was looking forward to seeing a little Auk.
We had to walk for a good half hour to find the right spot but David set an impressive pace and we overtook several less pacy birders on the way. This was how it would be today. No messing about. When we found the right bit of the right estuary David silently scanned the water, wielding his telescope like a periscope. After a couple of sweeps he stopped and zoomed in. ‘Got it,’ he said, ‘one little auk for you.’ I could only really see its back but that was enough: stocky, cuddly, cool, sometimes noisy – this was definitely an auk.
David didn’t tell me till later that this was actually his first ever little auk too. He was thrilled. I was thrilled for him. It was my first ever little auk, but that wasn’t quite as significant. And this was a special bird, particularly here in Kent. They’re usually found in places like Greenland, and were featured the week before on the BBC’s triumphant Planet Earth series as being the most numerous species of bird in the Arctic, and here was one having a bath in a lake just forty miles from my house. Often described as the ‘penguins of the northern hemisphere’, they are charismatic birds. Dressed like puffins but without the ridiculous beak, they strike just the right balance between formal and relaxed. Smart casual, I think, is the term.
After a few minutes’ appreciation we moved on. There was no point hanging around – we’d got our first bird, now we wanted more. The next stop was Oare Marshes, scene of my cowardly long-billed dowitcher failure two weeks before. That time I’d been too scared to ask the big boys for help. This time, I was being chaperoned by a rock star (well, former musician, but rock star made me feel pretty bloody cool) and my confidence was restored.
He found the dowitcher immediately, shuffling around only thirty feet from where we’d parked. To me it looked exactly like a snipe.
‘No, it’s the dowitcher,’ said David. ‘It’s much more slender. It’s more like a godwit than
a snipe. Of course, it sounds like a cross between a wood sandpiper and an oystercatcher …’
‘Fine,’ I said, ‘I believe you. It’s a dowitcher.’
There were more birds here than at Cliffe, so David quickly scanned the area, a bit like the Terminator. I tried to copy his actions, but couldn’t really pull it off.
‘Bar-tailed godwit on the right,’ he said, ‘have you got that?’
‘I didn’t,’ I replied, ‘but I do now.’
‘And there’s a ruff just behind that, there, see it?’
‘A ruff?’ I shouted. I was still excited by the picture of the ruff I’d seen in my book.
‘Yes, a ruff, right in line with the lifebuoy.’
I looked for several minutes at anything right in line or even nearly right in line with the lifebuoy. I couldn’t see anything that resembled my ruff.
‘Come on Alex,’ said David, not exasperated but nearly. ‘It’s got a medium bill, plain chest, long quite yellow legs …’
‘… and an enormous Elizabethan-style collar round its neck, I know.’
‘Ah,’ said David. ‘No, I’m afraid you don’t know. They do have spectacular plumage during the breeding season, but normally they’re just like that bird there.’
I found the ruff and was grateful but disappointed. I’d really wanted to see a bird with an enormous Elizabethan-style collar. But at least I now had a reason to carry on birding until the following breeding season at least.
Stopping only to scoff our homemade sandwiches (no dithering in service stations for us) we raced over to Ferry Lane for another couple of species: rock pipit and water pipit. Pipits look as their name suggests, small and inoffensive. They didn’t do much for me, I preferred the little auk, but already I’d seen more new birds in one day than Duncton had in the last four months. What had he been playing at?
David allowed us a strictly limited amount of time to check out each location. We were disciplined, nipping into the Isle of Sheppey to grab a couple of partridges (a grey partridge and one that looked as absurd as our blue-helmeted guineafowl called a red-legged partridge – highly recommended) and a golden plover, then nipping straight out again. I didn’t even have time to make my golden plover/yellow jumper joke.
Time was running out. It does that when you’re having fun, apparently, so we must therefore, have been having fun. But it also waits for no man and is of the essence – time represents fun2 but you can’t waste it – so we raced down to Elmley Marshes (previous home of my osprey) for a final march round as dusk settled over Kent. For the first time that day, we found nothing. David had been hoping for a merlin but was denied it and we never found the fieldfares.
But then, on the final stretch before the carpark, a ghost-like vision flapped out right in front of us. ‘Shh …’ said David.
‘I wasn’t saying anything,’ I replied.
‘Well shh now then … there! Barn owl!’
He was right of course. Not far away, sitting calmly on a fence post was a softly glowing barn owl. It looked fuzzy but fantastic through the binoculars, its big white face beaming out like the moon. ‘They really are so wise,’ I said, a touch emotional after a whole day’s birdwatching. It had been an enjoyable and highly successful day and I was content.
‘Well, no, they’re not really,’ said David dispassionately. ‘In terms of the size of their brain they’re one of the least intelligent birds around. The trouble is that a third of their head is made up by their eyes. Even a pigeon is cleverer than an owl.’
‘Right,’ I said, ‘but they can swivel their heads all the way round though, can’t they?’
‘Not all the way, no.’
‘But they can swivel them a bit? Their heads are quite swivelly?’
‘They are quite swivelly yes, Alex. Let’s go home.’
I’m not sure I would have coped if my two owl facts had been dashed at once. Even in my desolate non-birdwatching days I’d been fond of owls, mainly because of their swivelly heads. I liked to imagine the head would be useful for an owl family going off on holiday in their car. The younger owls would be quarrelling in the back, much like Mat, Chip and I may occasionally have done. The owl parents could just swivel their heads round and tell them to shut up. Mum and Duncton would have loved that. Of course, having a younger brother with a swivelly head may have been too much of a temptation for Mat and me. We may well have spent the whole journey testing out the swivel limits of Chip’s head, which would have resulted in car sickness. But then again, he would have been an owl, so I presume he’d only have puked up a pellet – easy to clean up.3
We saw ten new birds in eleven hours that day, not a great hourly rate but an impressive and invaluable total at this late stage of the game. When I finally got home I drank too much red wine and fell asleep in a chair.
16 November
That, I thought, was my final outing with David for the year. With two kids, his weekends were precious. There were now only six weekends left, including the run up to Christmas, and David would have to spend more time with them than me. I still believed that being able to birdwatch helped you be a good dad, but I also saw that being a good dad did not help you to be able to birdwatch.
But while we were scampering around Kent something amazing had happened down in Devon, something huge, something historic, something that would make headlines around the world – well, around the birding world anyway.
Just before falling unconscious in the sitting room I’d received a text from Tim, my friend and brand new bird enthusiast:
Horne! Was watching the news. Apparently there’s a rare merlot about. Thought you should know. Tim.
This meant nothing to me. I’m happy with this cheap shiraz, I thought, and poured myself another glass.
What Tim actually meant to write was ‘murrelet’, a word of which neither he, nor I, nor predictive texting, had ever heard. A ‘long-billed murrelet’ to be precise; a Japanese bird that had somehow found its way to Dawlish in Devon. My Batlaptop was buzzing with talk of the bird the following morning. Unfortunately my head was also buzzing with a hangover and I couldn’t leave my sitting room. Instead I read as much as I could bear about the murrelet.
It was really rare. Really rare. ‘Best bird this decade,’ wrote one frantic birder. ‘Once in a lifetime stuff,’ wrote another. I looked up murrelet in the back of my still shiny new Collins Bird Guide. I found ‘ancient murrelet’ in a section entitled ‘accidentals’: birds that ‘have been recorded only once or twice’. The page included species like a wandering albatross that turned up in Belgium in 1833, some ostriches that ambled into Israel in the 1920s and a masked booby that turned up in Spain in the winter of 1985. But there was no ‘long-billed murrelet’, because no long-billed murrelet had ever been seen anywhere in the Western Palaearctic before. This was special.
Just how bad is my hangover? I thought, gradually registering the significance of the bird. I tried to get up, felt dizzy and sat down again – there was no way I could drive to Devon, even for a bird that would require a reprint of my guide. Unable to make the trip, I tried to find a picture of the bird in places other than my now out-of-date new guide. Luckily, Rachel’s Sunday paper had a couple of amateurish but passable photos of it swimming around happily just off the shingly beach. It looked quite like the little auk David and I had just seen – indeed at first that’s what people had thought it was. It was only when pictures were posted on the internet that some more eagle-eyed members of the BirdForum.net website realised it might be something far rarer.
*
The next morning I was fully recovered and raring to go. I checked Birdguides. The bird was still in Dawlish, but I had to be in Lincoln for a gig by 7 p.m. that night. Lincoln is three hours away from Kensal Green but four hours away from Dawlish which was five hours away from London. That’s not the easiest way of saying it was possible. But it was. Just. I decided to risk it.
Forty-five minutes later I’d only travelled three miles from my house. Monday mor
ning traffic is never good, but today the roads were even busier than usual. They’re all off to Devon to spy on our Japanese visitor, I decided. Lucky them. I wouldn’t be joining them today.
I turned back, feeling dejected and foolish, a bit like how I feel when Liverpool are knocked out of some cup competition. I shouldn’t have got my hopes up, but up they were, and now I’d missed my opportunity. I had to spend the next two days doing gigs even further north than Lincoln, staying in a couple of disappointing hotels en route, so the earliest I could possibly make it down to Dawlish was Thursday. Surely this would be too late. I did contemplate cancelling the shows, but then I thought about Rachel and what my real job was, and knew I had to go to work. I clearly wasn’t a bona fide twitcher yet.
Before abandoning hope entirely, however, I did leave a message with David to see if he was planning a visit. ‘Would love to get down there,’ he wrote back, ‘but don’t have a car. Think I’m going to have to miss it.’ I told him I was planning to go down on Thursday if the bird was still around and if he fancied a lift he’d be more than welcome. ‘I’ll be there. You’re a star,’ he wrote back immediately. David’s not a twitcher either, he’s a proper birder, but this bird really was very rare. Even Duncton briefly contemplated making the pilgrimage, before deciding he couldn’t miss his RSPB duties.
On Tuesday the murrelet was still floating around just off the Devon coast, 6,000 miles from home. More than 2,000 birdwatchers had descended on Dawlish and the newspapers were full of articles describing the amazing sight (the birders, now, not the bird). This sort of thing is easy fodder for journalists. Just a headline like ‘The twitchers have landed!’ will make most readers shake their head and tut in knowing disbelief. Occasionally this incredulity turns to disapproval, when a paper like the Daily Mail self-righteously describes a gang of twitchers harassing a rare bird in the same outraged language they use to moan about happy-slapping hoodies: